All views expressed on this site are mine, not Alan Milburn's. This is not his official site, alanmilburn.co.uk. This site was an attempt to log the activities of Mr Milburn, and to perhaps encourage him to set up his own blog (or take over this one), but it's been discontinued.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Meeting Alan Milburn

I've been in to meet with Alan Milburn today to discuss how he could use a blog to help him communicate with his constituents. We talked for around half-an-hour about blogs and blogging, email communication and Darlington in general. Alan seemed to appreciate the way a blog could help him communicate with constituents, though did point out that most constituents contact him via phone, fax or letter, very few via email.

Alan seemed very keen for the blog to continue, and was interested in himself and his office taking a more active role, but was reluctant to commit to personally updating the blog before he had a better understanding of how much of a time committment it would be. He actually seemed to quite like the idea of keeping a more independent voice (erm, me) writing on the blog, so I may be around for some time (until I step down to spend more time with my family).

As a halfway step, one of Alan's constituency workers is going to start posting items to the blog (the same person who emailed about Alan's day in Darlington last week), in addition to me. I've sent a blogger invite to join the blog so, hopefully, they will be along shortly to introduce themselves. Each post to the blog is tagged with the name of the author, so readers should be able to easily see who posts what.

8 Comments:

Yey Alan! Congrats and all for allowing your folk to join in on the blog, but come on - 30 seconds a day to reassure your consituents that you're fighting our corner? Surely that's a 'time commitment' worth making?

It is at this point that I would like to warn Mike and Alan that one must be careful not to take advantage of the other. It was many months of vetting and forwarding Tony Blair's email without reward or progress that finally caused me to snap.